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Legislative Politics in Connecticut

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

W. Duane Lockard
W. Duane Lockard
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
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Extract

Although there is a voluminous literature on the organization and procedure of state legislatures, material on their politics is relatively sparse. The classic work of A. Lawrence Lowell, now more than a half-century old, still appears to be the chief reliance of scholars in the field. Lowell's thesis was that parties were relatively insignificant in state legislatures; virtually the whole of the subsequent literature agrees with this. In the case of the Connecticut legislature, it would seem that parties, far from being relatively insignificant, play a dominating role.

The study of party influence in a legislature necessitates a two-level approach: analysis of the role of the party leadership and of the voting behavior of the party membership. Several questions must be answered with regard to the party leadership. Are the party leaders an identifiable and cohesive group? Do they develop a definite program for legislative consideration? Is their authority shared with factional leaders capable of frequent disruption of the party program? Are committee chairmen or party leaders in the stronger position for actually forming legislative policy? Do pressure group leaders work through the formal party leaders or do they attempt to build ad hoc legislative majorities for their bills through independent action?

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 1954 , pp. 166 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1954

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References

1 “The Influence of Party Upon Legislation in England and America,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1901, Vol. 1, pp. 321–543 Google Scholar.

2 In a recent survey of legislative politics, Professor O. Douglas Weeks reported that his findings “in general substantiate the statement of Luce that ‘everywhere except in New York there is much less partisanship than is commonly supposed’ and that ‘leadership is rarely now and in our time rarely has been a matter of party control’.” See his “Politics in the Legislatures,” National Municipal Review, Vol. 41, pp. 80–86, at p. 80 (Feb., 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. William J. Keefe corroborates Weeks' views with regard to Illinois in his “Party Government and Lawmaking in the Illinois General Assembly,” Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 47, pp. 55–71 (March-April, 1952)Google Scholar. Reports on New York and New Jersey, however, suggest that party has considerable influence in the legislatures of those states. See Moscow, Warren, Politics in the Empire State (New York, 1948)Google Scholar and McKean, Dayton D., “A State Legislature and Group Pressures,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 179, pp. 124–30 (May, 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The latter, speaking of New Jersey, comments (at p. 127): “If a group is wise, it goes to the party leaders and not to the members of the committee in charge of the bill. The committee will almost always follow the advice of the leaders…. Party control of legislation is therefore much more stringent than in Congress.”

3 After looking over materials suggesting the absence of party control in other states a former Connecticut legislator expressed surprise and commented: “I had always supposed they did things the way we do.”

4 One pressure group representative told the writer that it was useless to ask even committee chairmen to take specific actions, for the inevitable question from the legislator was “What does the boss say about this?”

5 Keefe, “Party Government and Lawmaking in the Illinois General Assembly” (cited in note 2).

6 Ibid., p. 58.

7 Congress presents another striking contrast. Key, V. O. Jr., in his Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949)Google Scholar studied congressional roll calls in both houses and found (p. 370) that for the sessions studied during the 1930's and 1940's the Senate and House had the following “proportion of roll calls on which each [party] registered an index of cohesion of 70 or more (an equivalent of an affirmative or negative vote of 85 per cent or more of the group)”:

Compare this with data similarly calculated for the Connecticut General Assembly for the period 1931–1951:

8 It is also worth noting that there is little sectional cleavage in the state, since Connecticut is small and does not have any large city dominating the rest of the state as in the case of Massachusetts, Illinois, and New York. Thus, again, the divisions tend to follow party lines, not extraneous factors.

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